The Way Out

by Craig Childs

  I stand, and the drapes of my serape fall to my knees. Cold is on my skin. I turn back so that I can collect my night’s gear. Dirk and I quickly strike our camp as I tell him that I noticed a way around to the west, a bench of stone. He says, “Good, it’s about time.” We load up and follow this nearby route, sent into gaps of boulders. We lay our hands on the rock, pushing and balancing ourselves.

  Ahead of me, Dirk looks up, and I know that he is searching for the source of these freshly broken boulders, all of them taller than most city buildings, their edges cornered by impact. He cranes back, probing the narrowing cliffs. Where was the break? Which face gave way? How long ago? Where will you send me?

  The route doubles back high over the chasm we crossed at dusk yesterday, the second chasm, the one that had been filled with so much darkness. Now we are on its opposite side and some distance downstream. Only a narrow ledge is allowed, curving dangerously into the dark below. Our hands spread on the wall to our sides, contact made. Hold us here, please.

  Every step is frank, given just the right measure of weight and momentum. The chasm inhales below us and we stop, gingerly lowering our packs onto a wider platform, crouching, looking in. I pick up a small rock and toss it. After a few seconds, it springs off the opposite wall, then falls from view, hitting still another wall, then another, finally plucking the still water far below. The stone sinks to the floor unheard. This unfathomable darkness seems alive to me. It consumes, quietly covering whatever falls in.

  My weight taken by my knees, my hands lie on the stone. I should have slept there last night, I think. I should have proved that I can keep my heart beating, that it will not come to rest even in the death of space. Only then would I have known if I will survive where my father did not.

  Dirk pulls me away again. I am caught staring so deeply that I have trouble looking up at him when he lifts his pack. Time to keep moving. Another crossing remains ahead.

  I shoulder my pack, exaggeratedly careful with my weight, and look back once. Out of habit. My fingers graze the smooth stone on my necklace. I feel fragile all of a sudden, a leaf fallen to the ground and about to be swept up.

  I hear Dirk’s boots across loose plates of rock. They call my attention, and I turn from the second chasm, following him away, the spell broken. We walk through a gap into the light, and the morning’s sunrise returns to me. I recall the earlier sensation of sitting on the rock edge, my life honed to a rhythm in that first light. The act of remembering is so much more potent than the act of forgetting.

  As we come away, the muscular stone swales of this next chasm lift around us. We slip through an open basin to the bell-curve drop of a cliff.

  Dirk points suddenly into the air and blurts, “Tiny bat!”

  I look up and see the same, a dark wing-fluttering creature that darts against the sky. This means something to both of us. It suggests the presence of insects—bats being eaters of insects—and then perhaps a place for them to live, vegetation somewhere. Birds, maybe. A steady source of water. A few minutes later we come to an edge. Looking directly into the third chasm, we see far below a silver string of flowing water. Sunlight touches it, dazzling the chasm walls with arcs of green and yellow. The water pours down ledges, the sound of loose change falling from step to step. Upstream the water is enclosed in a tight alley, a narrow swim.

  I crouch to relieve the weight from my back. My arms hang across my knees.

  “Tiny bat,” Dirk says, nodding in agreement with some conclusion he had come to.

  I look toward the chasm’s head, which does not connect to any higher country. This water cannot be recent snowmelt from a far mountain; for that there would have to be a far mountain. It is not left over from the recent storm. A spring must be feeding it, water from out of the earth.

  Dirk and I cut back and forth down the bell of sandstone. Shadow-bolted cliffs and humps of rock gather around one another, pinning down this small creek, holding it to a thin channel. A couple of hundred feet above the water, we are taken across crusts of dark crypto soil interrupted here and there by smooth backs of rock. Crossing these lanes of fragile, steepled substance is like walking summer sea ice in the Arctic, coming to thin spots of meltwater, finding ways around so that we don’t have to slog clumsily through.

  There is a place where we must cross, no way around. Soil crushes under our step as we waltz across. Here, I stop and come to one knee, my body carefully balanced under my pack. I place a finger in a mark left in the ground. Dirk stops beside me.

  I say, “Human.”

  It is exactly where I was going to step, a faint scuff in the ground, a horseshoe divot left from the toe of a boot. How old? I trace it with my finger. Six months maybe, wind-eroded but rigid enough that it was not beaten apart by late-summer thunderstorms.

  While I ponder this mark with my finger, Dirk walks this print to the next and to the next. A short distance away, he turns and says, “This person knew how to move out here.” He follows the tracks back to me, doubling back in his own prints.

  “Two of them,” he says. “Walking just off from each other. They got this walking thing down. Kindred monkeys, I’d say, same tribe as us.”

  I rise to a half crouch and slowly pace out the footprints. Might we know them? Dirk is right. Instead of walking straight across, point A to point B, with an open, regular gait, these two had moved left and right, a hunting kind of walk acquired by knowing this kind of country. It is why maintained trails are such puzzling things to me, indifferent to the ground, serving a sole purpose unlike the fractures that pop out of the earth, canyon floors that command both water and footsteps. The trails out here are hardly visible at all. They are the lanes of juncos in flight, droppings of bighorn sheep cracked in drought, a footstep remembered of a partner thirty seconds ahead. These two travelers six months before us have this way of walking.

  Their steps gravitate toward a bit of wash sand, where they vanish, aiming for solid rock crossings. Thin slabs of stone had been avoided lest they break underfoot. I look at Dirk, who is lining his stride with them, determining who they might have been, how quickly they were walking. He is scenting with his motions, picking up their trail, losing it, picking it up again.

  I wonder at the travelers’ knowledge of this place. Do they know it the way Dirk and I know other parts of this desert, moving freely without thought of folded maps, recognizing certain boulders from years before? If this is true, then in a single day they would be able to cross the entire distance that Dirk and I have walked in nearly two weeks. In our own familiar landscapes Dirk and I know the routes that can speed us across terrain in days, where others would take months, and where some would surrender, claiming the place as absolutely impossible.

  I know what these two will do when they see our infrequent footprints months or weeks from now. They will examine us, riveted. Their fingers will scrape the inside of my toe. They will blow away loose sand that has gathered around Dirk’s heel. They will follow us even if we are out of their way, tracking us across bare stone where we leave no prints, reading our minds by the directions we choose, seeking a small rock that only a boot will break, searching for even the scatter of that same broken rock when I stopped and turned around to erase the mark of my passage. This is how they will know us.

  Dirk and I walk down a belt of sandstone with this new knowledge of human presence. I think of these other travelers as I move, watching them in front of me, behind me. Other people, strange animals like myself. They appear beneath my next step, a dead gray branch of juniper partly snapped on the ground, right with me, the same move. I become curious when I do not find a track in hardpack sand where someone should have stepped, where there should still be a faint impression. I stop and look for another possibility, spotting a way not far to my left. I walk in that direction, assuming that these two people came through here and dropped into this funnel of a short canyon. Eventually I hear Dirk descending behind me.

  Dirk passes me and is the first to reach the ch
asm floor. I stop above him, just at the margin of marbled light reflected up the walls. I resist going down. Although as immense as the two others, this third chasm seems strangely serene. The water sings down the passage. It gives an illusion of meaning to this landscape, elucidating the form and function of this chasm’s every bend. It feels good. But it is alien. We could actually walk along it, where the other chasms had been impassable. I feel like a raven hesitating over some unfamiliar object on the ground, strutting near to it, ready at any moment to startle away, opening my black wings, accusing it with a voice of gravel and stone. What is this thing below me, this beautiful creature of clear, sunlit water and carved earth?

  I drop my pack, pull out the map, and study the place from an overhead perspective. The chasm appears long and fairly straight between topographic lines. Straight? Out here? This is nonsense. It should be wrapped inside out and backward. And when have I ever seen water flow like this through an unknown desert?

  With the map flagging from my hand, I speak down to Dirk, who is at the edge of the water. “Let’s get a camp set somewhere. We have enough food, plenty of water. Keep it light and go back, check out those last chasms we crossed.”

  Dirk looks at me as if I were insane. “What are you talking about, going back?”

  “Just drop back into the last two crossings. Poke around a little. We were moving too fast for me to get a good look.”

  “They were dead ends.”

  “I’m sure there are other routes. Must be.”

  “Listen, this is the promised land. I’m not going back into Satan’s eternal glory hole when I’m here in the land a goddamned milk and honey. That place damn near killed me.”

  Dirk disregards my deliberation and comes to one knee. He puts his hand into the water, then feathers it with his fingers the way a merchant might examine a sack of beans. He looks upstream, sees the gathering walls of sandstone, huge and pale. He judges the chasm’s dimensions. From what he learns in this instant, he can assess the water’s quality. He knows its history, how there is very little mud, mostly sand, telling him that it flows mostly across stone. It does not come from far away. It is good water, drinkable. Springwater. Planting both hands in the stream bed, he lowers his mouth and drinks.

  Even with the way the country we just crossed lures me back, I share Dirk’s curiosity. This unexpected stream is full of diamonds. Bubbles gather and spread below each short waterfall. I drop down behind Dirk. The stream floor is a coral-reef waterscape: sand ripples and ghostly, decaying cottonwood leaves that have drifted down from far off. I drink. The water tastes nothing like that of a water hole, no greenish flavor of rampant life, no dark putrefaction. It is water that runs year-round, host to beetles and threads of algae making their way unhurried through their life cycles. It tastes like nothing at all in my mouth, yet there is a flavor. It is the taste of presence.

  Among the aquatic life below me are zips and spins of nearly invisible insects and crustaceans eating back chlorophyll hayfields of greenery. From my knees, I watch the cowlike grazing of caddis fly larvae in their cases made of twigs and sand grains. Patrols of waterborne predators loom over these herbivores.

  I realize that my sense of scale has been ruled by hugeness over the past several days of walking. I have been in an enormous landscape, my eye constantly drawn to infinitely distant points. For the first time in days I am taken by smallness, chevrons of ripples leading into a chute of water, the darting of coffee-stained beetles into groves of algae.

  My eyes drift away. I study the curve of ridgelines that Dirk and I have just come through, figuring out the best way to return beyond last night’s camp into the deep fissures that lie behind us. Dirk sees my gaze and follows it.

  “I’m not going back there,” he says.

  I draw my lips together. “Aren’t you even curious?”

  “Listen, this is the winter ass end of nowhere. It’s not like we just pulled into the Hilton parking lot and we’ve got mints waiting on our pillows. We don’t even know what’s up ahead. We still have to find the way out. Mister Toad’s Wild Ride ain’t over yet.”

  But I do not want to back away. I don’t believe Dirk. The wild ride is behind us. I’m afraid that I have not finished my business here. I still nervously tinker with my necklace, eyes tracking the land we have just come down. I leave Dirk and stroll along the smooth, round floor of the chasm to sort out my feelings.

  I stop at a scent, my head jarring to grab it. It smells like fur, like an animal, musky and dark.

  Immediately the scent is gone, passed by as soon as I move. I step backward to try to walk through it again. It is no longer there. I trace the air, lifting my nose. What animal was that? I wonder, reaching down, wetting my fingers, then dampening the rings of my nostrils. I can smell the sandstone’s slow rusting and the dry wood of dead junipers. But no animal. I walk nearly in a circle, crossing the stream with a leap, then crossing back.

  It had been the musty smell of a large animal. Bighorn sheep. Mountain lion, maybe. Something nearby, up one of these shaded canyons closing in from every side. It’s too close for a coyote. Coyotes tend to keep their distance. I remember my father and his coyote hunts, how he was able to draw them to us. Maybe I should not be so certain of what I believe about coyotes.

  I cannot recapture the scent. My memory does not have enough of it to grab. Mountain lion, I believe, just because it is a pleasing thing to think. It is the only animal of size that would allow us to come so near to it, trusting its stealth not to be seen.

  This talisman necklace I wear is a gift from a mountain lion. A full-grown male once approached me at a water hole. I was alone. The lion circled me from ten feet away, green, calm eyes hunting my strengths and weaknesses. Never once did I break eye contact. When it was done, when it decided whatever it needed to about me, it left, and I stood there frozen. I was wearing this pendant at the time, but low, out of sight on a long cord. The necklace that I kept tight at my throat in those days—my protection—was the image of a raven, something I had worn for years. After the lion left, I reached to touch the raven pendant and found it gone. It had fallen off, and even though I searched the ground, I could not find it. I then tightened this claw of greenstone to my throat, a new reminder, the sharpness of a predator hanging as protection in the delicate cup at the base of my throat.

  My fingers trace the pendant as I settle on this thought, that a mountain lion has been watching Dirk and me.

  I look up.

  No one there. I check my back, my front. I look across the high benches around me where the animal would be so easily camouflaged.

  There is a mountain lion in this chasm, I think. I turn back toward Dirk. I am ready to walk with him. This ride is not over.

  Elephant heads and mosque domes, hieroglyphics two hundred feet tall. We walk under a clear night sky, the land raging with the chill fire of moonlight, dust grays and cream shades, no true colors at all here on the ground. No reds, no oranges, no yellows. Stars float around the near-full moon, turning the sky into the only color visible, a royal, ink-saturated blue. Dirk and I cross the stream back and forth, jumping, scrambling as we follow the third chasm. Our packs grind as they touch the walls. Footsteps echo in this darkly lit space.

  Every once in a while we have to use our lamps as we cross through gulps of shadow. My light swings down and meets moving water. The sight reminds me of times when I have been deep inside caves and have turned my headlamp onto some small, subterranean stream. The skeleton of the water’s movement becomes visible, a thing that cannot be seen in sunlight. I see the glacial rippling of shadows, patterns and pathways revealed as if looking through the planes of a crystal. I do not keep my light on the water for long. It seems to me to be an intrusion. But just for a moment, I crouch at the water and stare into it.

  Dirk and I reach the dry cove of a side canyon. We pass between its gateway walls. It is one of those canyons that could go on for miles, but it ends as soon as we enter, a giant, egg-shaped holl
ow, the plunge point of a flood’s waterfall. Even in the moon’s brightness, the walls of this canyon have no edges. It is as if this strange light is water, a solution, an agent that dissolves solids. Milk sand lies in a circular plain in this side canyon, and in the very center stands a solitary redbud tree. We are both drawn to the tree, pure caution in our movements, even more care than when we catwalked the second chasm earlier today. The tree gives off rays of spidery, leafless shadows. We do not walk in these shadows. We walk around them, as if reading the script on some monolith.

  In the shape of this room is the roundness of an enormous flood, a whirlpool that has shaved away the bedrock and filled the floor with sand. The eye of the flood must have been here, the only place lacking in turbulence. The redbud tree is the single seed kept safe in the center. There is nothing else alive in here.

  The tree is not tall. Its head is pressed down by floods, forcing the branches to swirl around one another. Its branches have taken the floods into their shapes, obeying the twist of water, becoming the flood. I have seen this same phenomenon, a mirror to the environment, in the way junipers take on drought, distorted as if in some elegant and painful dance. It is the fluid curvature of defiance and acceptance.

  The tree’s shadows cross in and out of its branches. One moment it looks as faint as lace, and I can imagine that the tree is not even here, that we will wake in the morning and find that we had seen only a ghost, an anagrammatic memory of a living thing. The next moment I touch it, and the rattle-bone branches clack against one another like a skeleton shrugging its shoulders.

  Dead branches have fallen to the ground. Dirk and I reach down and gather them. Not far away, we build a small fire. So cold tonight. Dry cold, every motion flushing out pockets of meager warmth in our clothing. Our breath does not show in the air. The idea of sleep, of laying our bodies on this dry-ice sand, is chilling. We hug the fire, eyes carried down into it.